The 10 strangest team names throughout the minor leagues

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The 10 strangest team names throughout the minor leagues

From the AHL to the LNAH, minor league teams have gone off the map to find their monikers. Here are 10 of the strangest throughout North America’s minor leagues.

In less than a week, Las Vegas’ NHL franchise will have its name and logo, and the discussion about all the possibilities the team passed over on its way to ‘____ Knights’ will begin. But no matter how bizarre the team name might sound to some, at least those same fans can take some solace in knowing the team’s not called the Baby Cakes.

And, yes, the Baby Cakes are the name of a real team, in a real league, playing real professional sports.

While there are no names quite that puzzling in minor league hockey, there are, nevertheless, some strange team names floating throughout the minor professional ranks. From the AHL to the FHL, here are the 10 strangest minor-league monikers in North America:

The Everblades are the first of several ECHL entries on this list, and only stay this high on the list because it’s actually pretty clear what the team is going for. Everglades. Everblades. Get it? Right. The logo isn’t bad at all, but it almost makes you wish they went with something alligator themed.

Though the Solar Bears have only been around for a scant four seasons, the name actually dates back more than 20 years. The Solar Bears were an IHL franchise before the league folded in 2001, and the ECHL team saw the rebirth of the name. It’s not the worst name, but the wordplay is a little thick. It screams 1990s fan-vote.

Yes, like the reindeer, and yes, they leaned into that one hard even when the name first came about back in 1981. The logo for the Federal League team, which is a league that exists outside of the world of Slap Shot, sees a reindeer, presumably the eponymous Dasher, atop the team’s name. The connection to between Danville and deer is hard to figure, so it seems like it was simply a try at an alliterative name.

Anyone familiar with the ECHL, or with Paul Bissonnette’s Twitter account, is likely familiar with the Nailers, if only because the name is ridiculous in the best of ways. But while the handle may seem nonsensical, it actually has a tie back to Wheeling. The city has a history of nail manufacturing, so it’s a nod to one of the former industries in town. That’s the truth, as strange as it may sound.

Formerly known as the Road Warriors, the team changed its name ahead of the 2015-16 season. While it doesn’t make much sense to anyone outside of South Carolina, the name holds some meaning in Greenville. Beyond the actual existence of an animal named the swamp rabbit — who knew? — the name pays tribute to the Swamp Rabbit Trail, a modern-day walking and cycling trail and former railway, which operated from 1920 to 1997.

It’s not a bad name, per se, but it’s a mouthful. There’s the connection to the railroad, of course, but it’s tough to really explain why the team went with ‘Dawgs’ over ‘Dogs.’ Apparently, the team had roughly 30 names to choose from, and Rail Yard Dawgs won out in the end, according to the Roanoke Times.

The Quebec-based league qualifies as minor-pro, but the names reflect how community based the clubs are. Assurancia takes its name from an insurance company that sponsors the club, but amazingly it’s not the most bizarre name the team has had. It was previously named after a window and door manufacturer, and their logo was a knight using a door as a shield.

The River Drivers name is a long way of saying lumberjacks. Really, that’s it. It’s an interesting name, we’ll give them that, but, for those unfamiliar with the terms, it’s hard not picture a boat captain when you hear ‘River Drivers.’ That said, the logo and jerseys for the River Drivers, who are based out of New Hampshire, are awesome. It deserves to be a big-league logo.

What is an IceHog? Can anyone answer that? The name dates back to the club’s UHL days, and somehow beat out Rhinos, Roughnecks, Ice Rangers and Rockets in a voting contest. It’s unique, if nothing else.

For the past five years, the team has been named after a radio station. Not sure this is worse than Baby Cakes, because at least it comes from a sponsorship, but you shouldn’t have to take a comically deep breath in order to recite the name of the team you play for, either. The logo actually reads Saint-Georges de Beauce Cool FM 103.5.

Play-in wildcard game? It's the National Hockey League not National House League

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Play-in wildcard game? It's the National Hockey League not National House League

Detroit Red Wings GM Ken Holland has thrown his support behind a play-in wildcard game for the playoffs. Holland has never had a bad idea...until now.

It’s not often, if ever, that your trusty correspondent disagrees with one of the brightest, most progressive voices in hockey. But when it comes to the notion of holding a wildcard play-in game to give one more team per conference a chance to make the playoffs, that’s where I have to draw the line with one Ken Holland.

Speaking to Gary Lawless of tsn.ca, the Detroit Red Wings GM and the man who brought us 3-on-3 overtime opined that he would like to see the playoff pool expanded to essentially have three wildcard teams instead of two. The wildcard team with the best regular-season record of the three would be guaranteed a playoff berth, while the next two would hold a one-game, winner-take-all event to decide the second wildcard team.

There hasn’t been much of an appetite for this sort of thing among the game's power brokers, thank goodness, but there wasn’t much of an appetite for 3-on-3 overtime at one time, either. Holland can be very persuasive. Not sure if he hypnotizes his fellow GMs by swinging one of his four Stanley Cup rings on a string in front of their eyes, but he has a way of getting them to come around his way of thinking. Here’s hoping they resist the temptation this time.

Here’s why. Because any excitement the wildcard race would create in the markets that are involved would be mitigated by the notion that the league is once again rewarding mediocrity. These teams have 82 games to prove they’re in the top half of the league. That doesn’t seem, at least to these eyes, to be too much to ask. A better idea would be to just give each of the No. 9 seeds a nice, shiny Participation Trophy and send them home for the summer.

Geez, Louise, don’t we have enough parity shoved down our throats by the NHL already? Let’s see, when a team is killing a penalty it is allowed, for reasons nobody seems to be able to explain, to ice the puck with impunity. And if it gets scored on, the penalized player is allowed back on the ice. Players can glove the puck ahead in the defensive zone, but not the offensive zone. The NHL has a draft to ensure that all the best players are distributed fairly. The NHL has a salary cap to prevent rich, large market teams from having a competitive advantage. Teams that lose in overtime or the skills competition get a single loser point for just showing up, which already creates trumped-up playoff races and bogus .500 teams. Someday when the league and the players can agree on it, they'll get around to streamlining goaltending equipment. The NHL awarded a trophy to the best defensive forward for more than 20 years before it decided to get around to establishing one for the league’s top goal scorer. Rather than reward excellence, the NHL has time after time tailored its rules and philosophy to bringing great teams down to the others’ level.

And this would just be another example of that. Last season, the Minnesota Wild limped into eighth in the Western Conference and lost their last five games of the season. The Colorado Avalanche finished five points behind the Wild, losing each of their last six games of the season. Wow, that would have been some game, eh? The only problem is that the way those teams were playing down the stretch, the league might have had to postpone the start of the playoffs to let them finish the game. When you take into account the 11 bogus points the Wild gained for losing in overtime and shootouts, they lost six more games than they won last season. And they still made the playoffs. That’s quite enough, thank you.

Had there been a play-in game in 2011-12, the Los Angeles Kings would have had to play the Calgary Flames in Game No. 83 of the season. If the Flames had won, the Kings would not have gone on to win their first Stanley Cup. If there had been one in 2014-15, the Winnipeg Jets would have faced the Kings and had they lost, we would have been deprived of their first-round series against the Anaheim Ducks, one that went four straight, but might have been the closest, most intense and competitive sweeps in the history of the game.

Look, most teams are already in the playoff race until the last quarter of the season. Unless they’re really bad, like say, Colorado is this season. The league constantly trumpets how close its games are, conveniently failing to point out the fact that it’s only that way because nobody scores goals anymore. The NHL loves its parity, but enough is enough. It reminds me of house league hockey where scorekeepers stop adding goals to the winning team if the margin between the teams is more than five goals, as if the kids are too dumb to figure out that they’re actually losing 14-0 if the scoreboard only says 5-0. It’s all a part of the everybody-gets-a-trophy mentality that many observers think is adding to a sense of entitlement in kids that they are now taking into adulthood.

I’m not about to wade into that debate at the moment, but one thing I do know is that there’s no place for it in the best league in the world where the players are also smart enough to know when they don’t belong in the playoffs. And it’s the NHL, which stands for National Hockey League, not National House League.

Jets’ Scheifele set to return after missing three straight with hamstring issue

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Jets’ Scheifele set to return after missing three straight with hamstring issue

The Winnipeg Jets aren’t completely healthy yet, but a major piece is back in the lineup Thursday as Mark Scheifele returns from injury. Scheifele, the Jets leading scorer, has missed the past three games due to a hamstring issue.

The Winnipeg Jets have been on a roll of late and their chances of pushing themselves out of a wild card spot and into a divisional slot are going to get a big help Thursday night with the return of Mark Scheifele to the lineup.

Scheifele, 23, has missed the past three games with a lower-body injury, and Scheifele said Thursday that the issue had to do with his hamstring, according to the Winnipeg Sun’s Ken Wiebe. The worst part about the injury, Scheifele said, was that he kept thinking he was going to be able to suit up only to be forced out of the lineup.

“It was an up in the air thing, and every morning you’re anxious to see how you’re going to feel. It was definitely tough mentally,” Scheifele said. “Today when I woke up and got on the ice I felt fine, continued to skate and it got better and better. I’m definitely very happy.”

The Jets get Scheifele back just as they’re about to enter a home tilt against the New York Rangers. If Winnipeg can pick up two points, they’ll move from the second wild card spot in the Western Conference into third place in the Central Division, leapfrogging the inactive Wild. That said, the Wild will have five games in hand on the Jets.

While much of the talk this season has (rightfully) been about the play of rookie Patrik Laine, Scheifele is putting together the best season of his young career and continuing the hot run of play that he had to closed out the past campaign. Through the first 26 games of the campaign, Scheifele had posted 13 goals and 13 assists, paced the Jets with 26 points and his point per game pace is far and away the best of his career. If he continues scoring at this rate, he could end the year with a 40-goal, 80-point campaign.

The timing for the career year is perfect for Scheifele, too. Winnipeg can be a tough market, but since signing his sizeable eight-year, $49-million extension in the off-season, everything — sans the injury, of course — has been coming up Scheifele.

With his return to the lineup, one of the coach Paul Maurice’s recent experiments will come to an end as winger Blake Wheeler will move out of the middle and back to his normal spot on the top line. Maurice had been running the Jets captain as a center in Scheifele’s absence, but he’ll now be skating alongside Scheifele in his usual spot.

The healthy return of Scheifele also marks a sign of some players coming off the injured list for the Jets, too. There’s still a way to go before the team is completely healthy, though. Tyler Myers, Shawn Matthias, Joel Armia and Nic Petan all remain on the injured reserve.

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ECHL defenseman Anthony Calabrese is “lucky to be alive” after a “careless, reckless” hit, and Tyler Murovich, who delivered the blow, has been given a 12-game suspension as a first-time offender.

There are few plays scarier than seeing a player hit from behind and sent headfirst into the boards. That kind of play is made that much harder to watch when knowing the severity of the injury suffered.

During an ECHL contest on Nov. 24 between the Norfolk Admirals and Atlanta Gladiators, ECHL veteran Tyler Murovich delivered an incredibly dangerous shove to the back of Anthony Calabrese, a 24-year-old defenseman who’s only 12 games into his ECHL career.

The result of the hit was frightening. Calabrese was left laying face down on the ice, near motionless. The Admirals rearguard would eventually be placed on a stretcher, taken from the ice and transported to hospital.

That may seem harsh to some given that Murovich is a first-time offender, but given the severity of Calabrese’s injury, it actually seems like a somewhat light punishment.

As a result of the hit, Calabrese suffered broken C7 and T1 vertebrae. In simpler terms, he broke both his neck and his back. Oh, and he also punctured his lung. In fact, Calabrese told The Virginian-Pilot’s Jim Hodges that doctors told the young center that he’s “lucky to be alive.”

“It was a miracle, and they say I’m going to make a full recovery,” Calabrese told Hodges. “It’s going to be a long road, but I’d rather be alive than be in a wheelchair the rest of my life.”

What helped Calabrese escape with his life, he told Hodges, was advice he had gotten early in his career from a high school coach. Calabrese was taught that if he was ever going into the boards head first to lift his chin and turn to the side in an attempt to avoid taking the brunt of the impact with the top of his head.

“That’s honestly the only thing that registered in my mind when I was going in: at the last minute, pick my head up,” Calabrese told Hodges. “I remember picking my head up and turning it to the right.”

Thankfully, doctors told Calabrese that he can eventually return to the ice and that the injuries suffered from the hit won’t cost him his career. His spinal cord, he told Hodges, wasn’t damaged due to the hit. And, as hard as it may be to believe, doctors said it was the “best possible break” in a situation such as Calabrese’s.

Montreal can't panic over injuries to Galchenyuk and Desharnais

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Montreal can't panic over injuries to Galchenyuk and Desharnais

While the loss of the two centers is a crushing blow in the short-term, this team is positioned too well to lose assets in a hasty trade scenario

The Montreal Canadiens will be without top center Alex Galchenyuk and fellow pivot David Desharnais for at least six weeks, perhaps even eight. Both players sustained knee injuries in recent games and the news is obviously not good. But GM Marc Bergevin would make it even worse by jumping into a hasty trade.

True, the Habs now look skeletal down the middle (though Tomas Plekanec isn't a horrible choice for the top line and Andrew Shaw can help out), but this is a short-term problem. Montreal is the top team in the Eastern Conference right now and with netminder Carey Price, they can win more than a few games in the next month or so just on the strength of his gifted play. And the Shea Weber-led defense has been better than expected, so even if the Habs are super-boring and conservative until February, they'll get some results.

Will Montreal still be on top by then? Maybe not, but as long as they don't lose like, 20 games in a row, they'll still be in a playoff position with enough runway left to climb back up the rungs. And as the Los Angeles Kings have proven twice already, you can win the Stanley Cup as long as you get into the playoffs, particularly if your goalie is one of the best on the planet (caveat: being a great possession team helps and the Canadiens are only middling).

But a trade is not the way to go, particularly since the Canadiens aren't deep to begin with. They don't have many attractive pro prospects right now – unless they can drum up interest in a Charles Hudon or Nikita Scherbak – and their best recent draft pick is defenseman Mikhail Sergachev, who should be seen as untouchable. I mean, if Pittsburgh offers up Evgeni Malkin for the 2016 first-rounder and a couple other goodies, you make that trade – but I don't think that's going to happen.

If anything, Montreal needs to build their pipeline up, instead of taking assets away from it. The Canadiens ranked just 23rd in the NHL in our most recent Future Watch edition and Sergachev was the only pick they made in the first two rounds this summer. They do have two second-rounders for 2017 (their own and Washington's selection), but again: they need those.

Galchenyuk and Desharnais will be back and in all likelihood, the Canadiens will still be in a playoff position. The short-term may seem a little bleak, but the price of a quick patch isn't worth the long-term loss. Patience is a virtue here.